There's cash on hand for the Lake Oswego streetcar, staffing for the constipated Columbia River Crossing and start-up costs for the eastside streetcar. There's $53 million for bus maintenance, a million for media relations and government affairs, and $10 million in the mysterious file drawer labeled "Contingency."

But for YouthPass, the essential bus ride to school for more than 10,000 Portland teenagers?

Not so much.

Come January, high-school students in Portland Public Schools will no longer receive a free TriMet pass for transportation to and from school.

For hundreds of students -- in a city where the on-time graduation rate is only 53 percent -- YouthPass might be the difference between going to school each day or bagging it.

"All of our kids use it," said Elisa Schorr, an assistant principal at Roosevelt. "For a lot of kids, there's no other way to get here."

That bus pass is the critical vehicle that lifts teenagers off the street and into the classroom. It's a lifesaver on field trips and after-school practice schedules.

And it shapes ridership patterns for the next generation of transit users.

TriMet's response? Big deal. Pay up or move on.

Former Mayor Tom Potter and the Multnomah Youth Commission deserve most of the credit for launching YouthPass in 2009. The idea for using Oregon's business energy tax credits to fund the $3.5 million program was borrowed from the Lane Transit District in Eugene.

When BETC imploded, YouthPass was part of the collateral damage. Lackluster lobbying failed to convince the Legislature to intervene. Portland Public Schools still hands over $800,000 to TriMet, but that's only enough to provide passes for students living near the poverty line and at least 1.5 miles from school.

As Schorr reminds us, 1.4 miles is "a long way to walk in the winter if you don't have a jacket."

For all the chapped lip service we pay to the importance of school in combating unemployment, drug abuse and gang violence, this city can't seem to find the means to provide free transportation to campus.

And when I challenged TriMet General Manager Neil McFarlane to explain why his agency wants to be reimbursed full youth fare -- $27 a month -- for each YouthPass, he argued that the decision not to charge students the $92 adult fare puts TriMet on the side of the angels.

"Think how heavily subsidized that student pass already is," McFarlane said. This, he reminded me, is an "era of hard choices. Perhaps this is a cue to rethink the program so that it re-targets those who are most needy, rather than providing a ubiquitous subsidy to all of Portland's high-school students."

Perhaps. Rethinking how many metro-area students truly qualify as needy is much simpler than recalculating the priorities and civic involvement of an agency that claims $1 billion in annual resources, collects $232 million in metro-area payroll taxes and has increased fares 35 percent more than inflation the past 10 years.

If that charade adds unemployed dropouts to the surplus of streetcars and light-rail fantasies, TriMet doesn't much care.